(De)Gendering (English-Spanish) Translation of Legal Texts

Abstract

Abstract Within Western culture, gender is frequently interpreted in terms of binarism (male versus female), derived from biological sex at birth. Nevertheless, there is an accelerating percentage of non-binary and transgender people, who are not related to binary nomenclature, and they also need to resort to legal documentation and their renderings into other languages. This fact becomes a troublesome issue that must be nowadays solved, especially when translating into Spanish, a grammatical gender language, from English, a non-grammatical gender language. In this paper we will first select a corpus of eight British legal documents representing highly demanded translation briefs. We will then search for 15 problematic lexical items, searching for their lexicographic definitions and translations, and we will later resort to their most feasible translations into the Spanish language, considering both gendered translations and genderless ones. Our research shows how the Spanish language has its own translation techniques, especially paraphrasing, to be able to provide the English-Spanish target readership with binary legal terms, and especially with non-binary ones.